In the fabrication of garments, one of the first steps is to spread the fabric to be sewn into the garment from a roll into long lengths on a cutting table. The lengths of fabric are unrolled first in one direction and then the roll is reversed and the fabric is laid upsidedown on the previous layer as it is unrolled in the opposite direction. This process is continued until a stack of layers of a predetermined height is obtained. At this point, a pattern is unrolled on top of the stack and the garment pieces are simultaneously cut out from all of the underlying layers beneath the pattern. It sometimes happens that a defect or flaw in the fabric will coincide with one of the pieces to be cut out in forming the garment. In order to prevent this, the worker, as the roll of fabric is unrolled, must inspect the fabric and at each point where a flaw occurs he must cut out the flaw and overlap the fabric and continue with the spreading operation. This is both time consuming and is a waste of materials since the flaw will often not coincide with one of the pieces to be cut out of the fabric to form the garment. It has now become possible to automatically inspect fabric as it is originally placed on the rolls and to mark the locations of flaws in a roll of fabric along the selvedge with either a metallic tape or with fluorescent ink which can be automatically detected upon the unrolling of the fabric. While this aids the operator in locating the flaws, it does not help him determine the position of those flaws with respect to the pattern.
Previous attempts to obviate this problem have included a mechanism which attaches to the fabric spreading machine and which carries a miniature marker, or pattern, in a loop which stays in registration with the corresponding position with the actual marker on the cutting table. The device is geared to the spreading machine to maintain exact position of the marker loop with regard to the spread fabric. The defect of this type of approach is that it does not show the actual registration of the flaw in the fabric with respect to the marker.